Recently, as personal computers (PCs) have become remarkably popularized in offices, networking techniques for connecting them have advanced. Conventionally, upon use, printers are connected to PCs in a one-to-one correspondence. As is often the case recently, a printer is connected to a network to allow PCs connected to the network to share the printer.
Under the circumstances, a print system exists, which receives print data written in the printer language created by a printer driver from the spooler of the OS of a PC, and a print job including this print data is spooled again, thereby providing a print job control function more advanced than the function provided by the OS. A known example of the print job control functions is the job grouping function of grouping a plurality of print job by numbering them, and transmitting the grouped jobs to the printer in the set order.
When a job grouping function is provided for such a print system, the print system performs sequence control on grouped print jobs by controlling the scheduling of the print jobs instead of actually merging the print data. Such a group of jobs looks like one job (to be referred to as a group job) to the user. This makes it possible to handle the grouped jobs together. Even if, however, the overall group is made to look like one job to the user, a plurality of jobs are continuously processed internally. As a consequence, such jobs undergo status transition different from that of general jobs.